As indicated by the title, the first studio I'll be examining is Pandemic.
Formed in 1998 by Josh Resnick, president, and CEO Andrew Goldman, two former Activision employees, Pandemic was formed with partial investment from Activision who also published their first two titles as a studio. These games were Battlezone II: Combat Commander and Dark Reign 2, released in 1999 and 2000 respectively for windows. Both were Activision IP and were not equally received upon release. Battlezone III, a hybrid of the FPS and RTS genres, was much anticipated by the public, however was hit hard by reviewers for its many bugs and high requirements to run for the time. Along with a multiplayer mode that wasn't functional until a later patch, I suspect Battlezone II failed to reach high sales, though I wasn't able to find any official numbers to support this. Dark Reign 2, on the other hand, had a slightly better reception with 77 metascore, high of 93 from PC Gameworld, and a low of 60 from various publications such as CNET Gamecenter. The game was praised for its graphics in comparison to other contemporary RTS games, with criticism coming in the form of its difficulty and not doing enough in terms of game play to distinguish it from others in the genre.
These first two games would be the only ones Pandemic developed directly for Activision. They were also able to open a second studio in Australia to work on Army Men: RTS while the main studio was given the opportunity to work with LucasArts on Star Wars: The Clone Wars for the Gamecube, PS2, and Xbox. The game features both vehicular based combat as well as third-person action as various Jedi during and after the events of the film of the same name. Unfortunately, the game wasn't particularly well received, sitting at a highest of a 73 for the Gamecube version on metacritic, with the PS2 version just below at 72. A common criticism was that, while there were fantastic elements to the game, they were not frequent enough and the product on the whole felt disjointed and simply average. Thankfully, this would not be the last chance Pandemic got with the Star Wars license.
While working on another title for Midway under the title of SpecWarrior, Midway decided to end their contract with Pandemic. Having already put time and resources into the project, Pandemic sued Midway for $4 million dollars in damages plus $750,000 in fees. Midway filed a counterclaim, stating that Pandemic had no merit to sue. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to find any report detailing the results of this lawsuit.
While working on another title for Midway under the title of SpecWarrior, Midway decided to end their contract with Pandemic. Having already put time and resources into the project, Pandemic sued Midway for $4 million dollars in damages plus $750,000 in fees. Midway filed a counterclaim, stating that Pandemic had no merit to sue. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to find any report detailing the results of this lawsuit.
Before they could return to a far away galaxy, Pandemic and Sony Imageworks partnered with the Institute for Creative Technologies, a US Army research initiative created to explore new techniques that could be used to improve training methods. While it seems as though the game, which would be released as Full Spectrum Warrior, perhaps a callback to the game they had been working on for Midway, was initially intended to be only for training purposes, with no commercial release, one was required in order for the team to have access to the Xbox as a platform. In the end, it was decided that two versions be created, one for original training purposes, and a second with various changes to make it a more viable commercial game. What set Full Spectrum Warrior apart was how it played. The game was a real-time tactical game where the player commanded squads, however the player doesn't directly control any squad member, only issuing orders, a unique and novel distinction from traditional tactical shooters of the time. The game ended up being the most well received title for Pandemic at the time, with the Xbox version getting an 84 on metacritic and the PS2 version a 74. There were some rumors and allegations surrounding this game and the military's use and the partnership with Sony being unfair, but nothing public to confirm any of this.
Immediately after, Pandemic released their latest project with LucasArts and the Star Wars IP they had begun working on back in 2002, but this time they weren't beholden to a specific film. Star Wars: Battlefront aimed to draw from all six films for their large scale battles. While the game didn't score particularly high in total, with a metacritic of 82 on PS2, which was the highest rated, the individual reviews ranged from as low as 50% all the way up to 94% between all versions. The game play, visuals, and online play were almost universally adored, while criticisms were primarily aimed at poor AI, and disjointed and confusing campaign that felt like an afterthought. Sales for the game's console version reached 4 million by 2007, with PC numbers breaking 290,000 copies by 2006, both only counting US sales. Striking while the iron was still hot, Pandemic released the followup, Star Wars: Battlefront II, the very next year to even greater success. The sequel scored better than the original, with the PS2 metacritic sitting at a 84 and Xbox just one point below at an 83. According to the NPD Group the game was also the sixth best selling game of 2005, was the second most popular game on Xbox in 2007,was still number 3 in 2008, and then jumped back to number 2 in 2009. The game was reported as selling 6 million copies by 2007, 2 million more than the first game in one year less time.
Keeping with their break-neck development pace, Pandemic also released Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction in 2005. Expanding their scope of large scale battles into the open world, Mercenaries was an ambitious title that earned even better average scores than their Star Wars game, the best version averaging an 86, but couldn't come close to matching sales numbers. My best source for sales reports the game sold a total of only .68 million worldwide. The game was banned in South Korea up until 2007 due to the game focusing on the war in North Korea, although I personally don't attribute this ban to the game's overall poor sales.
Meanwhile, the Australian team had been working on their own new IP with publisher THQ. This game supposedly came about through a joke made by a former member of Pandemic after a failed pitch for a kid friendly game to Microsoft. True or not, the game that came about, also in 2005, was Destroy All Humans, a game where the player controlled an alien sent to harvest human DNA to keep his species' DNA stable after generations of cloning. Critics enjoyed the level of open destruction they could achieve and goofy tone, but thought some game play aspects were lacking and missions were too similar, leaving it with an average score of 76 and 74 on the Xbox and PS2 respectively. They would go on to release a sequel the following year to a similar average score of 74 and selling over 340,000 copies just in North America.
Back in the US, Pandemic released another sequel, this time in the form of Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers. Unfortunately, this game couldn't muster the same level of reviews as the first and sits at a 71 average on it's best platform, the PS2. This would be the last game Pandemic released under THQ before Pandemic partnered with Bioware. With this new partnership, a second development team was created in the Australian office in 2006. However, no games were released during this partnership before EA acquired both Pandemic and Bioware.
Under EA, the US offices set to work on two titles, another sequel and another licensed title. The sequel, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, didn't set the world on fire. Not only was the studio's streak of "average" scores unbroken, coming in at 72 with the exception of the PS2 version which only reached 49, but the game also had to deal with some controversy. First was EA's misguided marketing stunt to give away £20,000 of petrol for free to anyone who visited their station, a max of £40 worth per visitor, that they had set up to look like a military bunker. A member of the local parliament described the event as an "ill thought-out media stunt," following the traffic issues caused. The Venezuelan government also came out against the game as a tool to create support of a real life US invasion due to Pandemic's previous relationship working with the US army on Full Spectrum Warrior.
Perhaps attempting to translate their successful formula found in the Battlefront series, Pandemic's next title was set in one of the only other franchizes that could compete with Star Wars in terms of popularity: The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings: Conquest borrowed a lot of the same game play mechanics from Battlefront, also being created by the same core team, and transplanted it into the world of Middle Earth. While this concept may have seemed like a sure hit on paper, the game ultimately flopped in terms of critical response. The game got a 55 on metacritic, with reviewers criticizing everything from controls, balance, AI, graphics, and more. In terms of sales, the best data I could find puts the game at about .63 million units sold, almost certainly far below expectations for a game bearing such a popular IP.
During this time the Australian team had been working on a game adaptation of The Dark Night. The title was never given a formal announcement, only leaked by Pandemic themselves and later actor Gary Oldman during an interview. It was supposedly going to be an open world style game, but after missing the release of the movie, the game was cancelled due to EA closing down the entire Australian office during a restructuring by EA.
Working hard on their next project, Pandemic released their first original IP since 2005's Mercenaries. The Saboteur was another open world game in a similar vein to Mercenaries except set during the conflict of WWII, and would release in 2009 as the studio's final game. The studio became aware of their impending closure and had to make various cuts and sacrifices to the game in order to release by the end of the year. Perhaps due to the over saturation of open world titles at the time, or games set in WWII, the game couldn't reach above a high of 76 on metacritic. Many outlets enjoyed the unique visual style the game presented, but found the game lacking in game play, AI, story, and being generally unpolished.
As the studio was closed down, 288 employees were let go, including high level executives, with only a small team of 35 being brought into one of EA's other studios Danger Close. Around a dozen or so former members of Pandemic were able to join 343 Industries to work on the Halo franchise, while others have gone on to Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Respawn Entertainment, and more.
While this behavior, of purchasing and closing down studios in a short period, has become somewhat tied to EA's reputation in the last year or so, it was not something the public payed as much attention to despite the trend already existing. Still, Pandemic wasn't the only studio to suffer in this closure, being just a part of a total of 1,500 jobs lost and joining Maxis and the Command and Conquer team's closures, as well as cancelling a dozen games that were currently in development.
This bring us to the question of this entire piece, and where I will go into full on opinion and speculation mode. What happened to Pandemic? Officially, the statement from EA was that the layoffs and closures were to "improve our cost structure, ensure quality, and build schedule integrity for this studio." To me, that is about the biggest corporate non-answer that could be given. A more interesting statement was this one about Pandemic's IP from EA's Games Label Senior Vice President Nick Earl. "I want to make it clear that the Pandemic brand and franchises will live on. In the months ahead, we will announce plans for new games based on Pandemic franchises." As we know now, Battlefront has made a return but that wasn't so much Pandemic's IP as LucasArts', and later Disney's. In fact, the only IP Pandemic worked on that EA has access to are Battlefront and Mercenaries, as far as my searching can show. Making another Star Wars game was an inevitability, and the Battlefront name had a lot of goodwill and fond memories attached to it so it made sense for EA to utilize it eventually. There was also the leaked information about a Battlefront III, however this was after Pandemic's time with the series and being developed by Free Radical, who may or may not end up being the subject of a Studios We've Lost in the future. So that leaves Mercenaries. As it turns out, one of those dozen games cancelled during EA's "restructuring" was Pandemic's third Mercenaries game, but in the almost 10 years since shutting the studio down and cancelling the project, EA has shown absolutely no interest in continuing that franchise.
Now, I don't believe that Pandemic's closure was only due to EA wanting the Battlefront name, despite it being basically the only thing left of Pandemic. In truth, I think Pandemic's demise was something of an inevitability. With the exception of the two Battlefront games, the studio never really had a "hit" to speak of. Their games were all rated alright to low in the eyes of critics, and from the sales data available, I would guess most were seen as financial failures, especially in their last few years. To their credit, though, the studio was able to make a good number of games in a relatively short time period. This was more common in the PS2 generation, and we could even see a decrease in releases per year once they moved to the 360 and PS3 hardware, but I think they still proved to at least be a consistent and efficient development studio.
AA games have been on the decline since the PS2 and original Xbox generation. We've seen games split to either giant, multi-million dollar budgets with hundreds or people working on it, or shoe-string indie games with a handful (or less) developers. Many people much more qualified than me have commented on this trend so I won't rehash it more than that, but my point is that Pandemic was one of those AA studios that just doesn't exist anymore. They made fun, medium sized games with issues, but could make them on a modest budget in a decent time frame and sell enough to fund their next project. While I, and many others, may not like it, studios like that just aren't what publishers want anymore. As much as we love to hate EA, I don't think Pandemic's fate would've been much different had they not been acquired, or were acquired by someone else. They could've finished their latest Mercenaries game, and their Australian team may have been able to release their Wii racing game, but without another commercial hit to offset the longer development times on the newer hardware, I don't see Pandemic surviving to today without managing to pull off more hits. Pessimistically, or maybe realistically, I would see them put out a couple more games over a few years to okay sales and passable scores, but find themselves bleeding money until they had to close on their own.
This ends my first Studios We've Lost. If anyone bothered to read this entire thing, first of all I'd like to apologize, and second I'd like to thank you. If anyone has suggestions on how to make this series better in future installments, I'm open to all forms of critical feedback. I hope this first attempt was a little entertaining, a little informative, and maybe a little interesting too.
Keeping with their break-neck development pace, Pandemic also released Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction in 2005. Expanding their scope of large scale battles into the open world, Mercenaries was an ambitious title that earned even better average scores than their Star Wars game, the best version averaging an 86, but couldn't come close to matching sales numbers. My best source for sales reports the game sold a total of only .68 million worldwide. The game was banned in South Korea up until 2007 due to the game focusing on the war in North Korea, although I personally don't attribute this ban to the game's overall poor sales.
Meanwhile, the Australian team had been working on their own new IP with publisher THQ. This game supposedly came about through a joke made by a former member of Pandemic after a failed pitch for a kid friendly game to Microsoft. True or not, the game that came about, also in 2005, was Destroy All Humans, a game where the player controlled an alien sent to harvest human DNA to keep his species' DNA stable after generations of cloning. Critics enjoyed the level of open destruction they could achieve and goofy tone, but thought some game play aspects were lacking and missions were too similar, leaving it with an average score of 76 and 74 on the Xbox and PS2 respectively. They would go on to release a sequel the following year to a similar average score of 74 and selling over 340,000 copies just in North America.
Back in the US, Pandemic released another sequel, this time in the form of Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers. Unfortunately, this game couldn't muster the same level of reviews as the first and sits at a 71 average on it's best platform, the PS2. This would be the last game Pandemic released under THQ before Pandemic partnered with Bioware. With this new partnership, a second development team was created in the Australian office in 2006. However, no games were released during this partnership before EA acquired both Pandemic and Bioware.
Under EA, the US offices set to work on two titles, another sequel and another licensed title. The sequel, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, didn't set the world on fire. Not only was the studio's streak of "average" scores unbroken, coming in at 72 with the exception of the PS2 version which only reached 49, but the game also had to deal with some controversy. First was EA's misguided marketing stunt to give away £20,000 of petrol for free to anyone who visited their station, a max of £40 worth per visitor, that they had set up to look like a military bunker. A member of the local parliament described the event as an "ill thought-out media stunt," following the traffic issues caused. The Venezuelan government also came out against the game as a tool to create support of a real life US invasion due to Pandemic's previous relationship working with the US army on Full Spectrum Warrior.
Perhaps attempting to translate their successful formula found in the Battlefront series, Pandemic's next title was set in one of the only other franchizes that could compete with Star Wars in terms of popularity: The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings: Conquest borrowed a lot of the same game play mechanics from Battlefront, also being created by the same core team, and transplanted it into the world of Middle Earth. While this concept may have seemed like a sure hit on paper, the game ultimately flopped in terms of critical response. The game got a 55 on metacritic, with reviewers criticizing everything from controls, balance, AI, graphics, and more. In terms of sales, the best data I could find puts the game at about .63 million units sold, almost certainly far below expectations for a game bearing such a popular IP.
During this time the Australian team had been working on a game adaptation of The Dark Night. The title was never given a formal announcement, only leaked by Pandemic themselves and later actor Gary Oldman during an interview. It was supposedly going to be an open world style game, but after missing the release of the movie, the game was cancelled due to EA closing down the entire Australian office during a restructuring by EA.
Working hard on their next project, Pandemic released their first original IP since 2005's Mercenaries. The Saboteur was another open world game in a similar vein to Mercenaries except set during the conflict of WWII, and would release in 2009 as the studio's final game. The studio became aware of their impending closure and had to make various cuts and sacrifices to the game in order to release by the end of the year. Perhaps due to the over saturation of open world titles at the time, or games set in WWII, the game couldn't reach above a high of 76 on metacritic. Many outlets enjoyed the unique visual style the game presented, but found the game lacking in game play, AI, story, and being generally unpolished.
As the studio was closed down, 288 employees were let go, including high level executives, with only a small team of 35 being brought into one of EA's other studios Danger Close. Around a dozen or so former members of Pandemic were able to join 343 Industries to work on the Halo franchise, while others have gone on to Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Respawn Entertainment, and more.
While this behavior, of purchasing and closing down studios in a short period, has become somewhat tied to EA's reputation in the last year or so, it was not something the public payed as much attention to despite the trend already existing. Still, Pandemic wasn't the only studio to suffer in this closure, being just a part of a total of 1,500 jobs lost and joining Maxis and the Command and Conquer team's closures, as well as cancelling a dozen games that were currently in development.
This bring us to the question of this entire piece, and where I will go into full on opinion and speculation mode. What happened to Pandemic? Officially, the statement from EA was that the layoffs and closures were to "improve our cost structure, ensure quality, and build schedule integrity for this studio." To me, that is about the biggest corporate non-answer that could be given. A more interesting statement was this one about Pandemic's IP from EA's Games Label Senior Vice President Nick Earl. "I want to make it clear that the Pandemic brand and franchises will live on. In the months ahead, we will announce plans for new games based on Pandemic franchises." As we know now, Battlefront has made a return but that wasn't so much Pandemic's IP as LucasArts', and later Disney's. In fact, the only IP Pandemic worked on that EA has access to are Battlefront and Mercenaries, as far as my searching can show. Making another Star Wars game was an inevitability, and the Battlefront name had a lot of goodwill and fond memories attached to it so it made sense for EA to utilize it eventually. There was also the leaked information about a Battlefront III, however this was after Pandemic's time with the series and being developed by Free Radical, who may or may not end up being the subject of a Studios We've Lost in the future. So that leaves Mercenaries. As it turns out, one of those dozen games cancelled during EA's "restructuring" was Pandemic's third Mercenaries game, but in the almost 10 years since shutting the studio down and cancelling the project, EA has shown absolutely no interest in continuing that franchise.
Now, I don't believe that Pandemic's closure was only due to EA wanting the Battlefront name, despite it being basically the only thing left of Pandemic. In truth, I think Pandemic's demise was something of an inevitability. With the exception of the two Battlefront games, the studio never really had a "hit" to speak of. Their games were all rated alright to low in the eyes of critics, and from the sales data available, I would guess most were seen as financial failures, especially in their last few years. To their credit, though, the studio was able to make a good number of games in a relatively short time period. This was more common in the PS2 generation, and we could even see a decrease in releases per year once they moved to the 360 and PS3 hardware, but I think they still proved to at least be a consistent and efficient development studio.
AA games have been on the decline since the PS2 and original Xbox generation. We've seen games split to either giant, multi-million dollar budgets with hundreds or people working on it, or shoe-string indie games with a handful (or less) developers. Many people much more qualified than me have commented on this trend so I won't rehash it more than that, but my point is that Pandemic was one of those AA studios that just doesn't exist anymore. They made fun, medium sized games with issues, but could make them on a modest budget in a decent time frame and sell enough to fund their next project. While I, and many others, may not like it, studios like that just aren't what publishers want anymore. As much as we love to hate EA, I don't think Pandemic's fate would've been much different had they not been acquired, or were acquired by someone else. They could've finished their latest Mercenaries game, and their Australian team may have been able to release their Wii racing game, but without another commercial hit to offset the longer development times on the newer hardware, I don't see Pandemic surviving to today without managing to pull off more hits. Pessimistically, or maybe realistically, I would see them put out a couple more games over a few years to okay sales and passable scores, but find themselves bleeding money until they had to close on their own.
This ends my first Studios We've Lost. If anyone bothered to read this entire thing, first of all I'd like to apologize, and second I'd like to thank you. If anyone has suggestions on how to make this series better in future installments, I'm open to all forms of critical feedback. I hope this first attempt was a little entertaining, a little informative, and maybe a little interesting too.
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